The subject matter disclosed herein generally relates to groups of autonomous vehicles, and more particularly to spatial recognition in an autonomous vehicle group.
Autonomous aerial vehicles operate without a human pilot using autonomous controls. In some applications, multiple autonomous aerial vehicles are used together in a group or swarm to accomplish a wide-scale or distributed task. Adding complexity to each of the vehicles drives up total system cost. As more functionality and features are added to each vehicle, the operating costs can increase due to added weight and power requirements.
When multiple autonomous aerial vehicles are managed as group, control system requirements become more challenging across the group. Knowledge of the precise location of each vehicle may not be as important as a relative position, for example, when flying in a formation. As the number of autonomous aerial vehicles in the group is increased, establishing and maintaining effective communication between the autonomous aerial vehicles may also become more challenging, particularly as the group spreads out over a wider range of operation. Exchanging precise position data between vehicles can be useful, but latency involved in acquiring, relaying, and interpreting the information may reduce accuracy when the vehicles are in motion.